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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit (www.rockpapershotgun.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (49 children)

The rent seeking on platforms like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play is absolutely gross considering how little value they actually provide. I'll be very glad to see them forced to reduce it to somewhere similar to a card transaction fee.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (38 children)

Here we go again. Armchair economists bleating "why everything cost money, corporate bad" with no actual expertise to back it up. Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise.

A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
A storefront that enables monetizing the game
The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
Network and operational security
(edit) Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.

That's where the cut goes.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And all the community features for the consumers.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The Community > Discussions page for a game is one of Steam’s most underrated features. The amount of times I’ve wanted to know something super specific about a game prior to buying and found exactly the info I was looking for in the Discussions page. Oftentimes with developer comments on said feature clearly labeled. So clutch.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

It's not the nicest place in the world, but it reminds me of Gamefaqs back in its hay day. I found advice there recently over yet another bad SE port crashing.

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